Science, Evidence, and the Resurrection

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

@John_Harshman

And though Sherlock Holmes has been reinterpreted in many ways, he’s never been reinterpreted as three people, so far as I know.

Two, though.

That Mitchell and Webb Look - Holmes and Watson

[Tim]

@faded_Glory

What does it even mean to say that two non-existing beings are the same?

Firstly, I would like to remind you that I never suggested that they were exactly the same, and put same in inverted commas to suggest that I was using the term only in a narrow sense.

The God of Islam and Christianity are the ‘same’ in that both religions consider him to be the creator of the universe, the “God of Abraham”, the God of the Old Testament prophets, and the God associated with Jesus (albeit with very different relationships – as together two parts of the Trinity in Christianity, and the God and his penultimate prophet in Islam).

This is not dissimilar to famous fictional (and thus also “non-existing”) characters being reinterpreted with considerable dissimilarities but being, at core, identifiable as being the same character. Hence I don’t see “non-existing” as a bar to this determination.

[faded_Glory]

I think I see where we talk past each other. In the absence of empirical confirmation that any of these gods actually exist, all we could say is that their depictions are the same. This is the same situation as with fictional characters. You know, the map is not the territory and that kind of stuff.

Even if phrased like that I would still disagree though. A god that is depicted as a Trinity is in no way the same as a god that is depicted as a strictly monotheistic entity. After all it is not as if the Trinity is an insignificant detail.

[Tim]

@faded_Glory

In the absence of empirical confirmation that any of these gods actually exist, all we could say is that their depictions are the same. This is the same situation as with fictional characters. You know, the map is not the territory and that kind of stuff.

I would actually term the details as “their depictions”. I think what you are analogising to a “map”, I would analogise as a ‘skeleton’ – that fixed ‘bare bones’ of the story that determines if we’re talking about the ‘same’ God (or fictional character), with the ‘flesh’ being the details (in your analogy, “the territory”) that ‘flesh out’ the character.

A detective who is in some way independent of the police who works with a medical doctor sidekick is still “Sherlock Holmes” under this rubric, even if the details are very different from those of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories.

@faded_Glory

A god that is depicted as a Trinity is in no way the same as a god that is depicted as a strictly monotheistic entity.

Yet there have been Christians historically (and even, I think, some today) who have argued that the God of Christianity isn’t Trinitarian, in spite of both them, and the people that they are arguing against, agreeing that they’re talking about the God of the Bible. It doesn’t make sense to me to claim that they’re arguing about ‘different’ Gods.

Likewise, experts on ancient religions believe that Yahweh went from being part of a pantheon of Gods to being a monotheistic God, within ancient Hebrew beliefs. Does that mean they stopped worshiping one God and started worshiping another different God? Or simply that their beliefs about their God changed?